I believe Fukuoka Kotaro will be the next dominant Japanese player. In Ryusei he won 14 games in a row: won all 11 games in his block and 3 games in main tournament. So he is now in the final against Iyama Yuta.

And he keeps doing well in the other major tournaments as well.

Almost everyone above him on mamumamu list for Japan at 19 year already went on to win lots of big titles.

http://mamumamu0413.web.fc2.com/rating/japan/age/01900.html

He is currently 7dan.

He jumped from 5dan to 7dan, after winning the Ryusei (to Iyama)

Fukuoka Kotaro will represent Japan at a new international tournament (Supreme player). It will be a round robin tournament and he will get to play against top 8 players in the world. I'm not sure he's at that level though: https://gotoeveryone.k2ss.info/news/wr/supreme-player/1/

He got the first place in the National team practice tournament in October/November. Two wins against Iyama, one against Ichiriki, and so on It will be great for his development to play in this new round robin tournament against such strong players. Hopefully this is a tournament with regular time controls, not fast Go

BTW the Japanese national team plays really good practice games.

It seems to have been overlooked here that Fukuoka set a new record in winning the Ryusei, his first title.

He won every game from his sole A Preliminary game (beating Cho Chikun; he was able to skip the B Preliminary) to Games 1 to 11 of the win & continue block preliminaries, meaning also he was one of the very lowest ranked initially) and then won all four games from Round 1 up to and including the Final (beating Iyama, having earlier disposed of Ichiriki) in the main tournament - the first time this has been done.

Incidentally, it is not the first time all 11 games in the block preliminary have been won - Kono Rin and Kyo Kagen did it, but they lost during the main tournaments.

19-year-old Fukuoka's good form in the Ryusei was attributed to playing somewhat more thickly then usual (even though he is adept at sabaki and shinogi) because the Ryusei is a quickplay, i.e. he was avoiding tactical melees to guard against byoyomi pressures.